Tuesday, April 15, 2008

That may be an understatement. When he sees me coming he gets a kind of twitch, and if I corner him for a conversation, at the first pause he literally runs.

The problem is paint chips. I can't stop talking about them.

Hubby would be more sympathetic, I think, if we actually had to make a decision about paint colours anytime within, say, the next two months. But ground-breaking for the new house starts today: right now the house I am so assiduously decorating in my mind is little more than a few sheets of paper and a big hole full of muddy water.

With classes over for the year, paint has rushed in to fill the vacuum left by literature and grammar. Sure I've got exams to mark, but I also have magazines to read and important decisions to consider. Is Whitall Brown too dark for all four walls of the Master Bedroom? And if I pair it with Natural Wicker, can I put the lighter colour on just one wall, or would that look weird?

This is by no means the first obsession I've encountered in my life, though it is one that clings with a certain tenacity. I went through a phase where all I wanted to talk about was the Turin Shroud. That one gave hubby the twitches too, but at least it had a certain appealing improbability, a quirky charm. At one time, figure skating was my obsession: I would cancel social events just so I could watch the latest in that post-Nancy-Kerrigan era of tacky professional competitions dubbed "U.S.A. vs. the World" or "Battle of the Sexes."

Bub is the same way: he latches onto a single interest with obsessive intensity, but then moves on in a week or two. At one time it was The Cat in the Hat, then Thomas trains, and now closure devices: buttons, zippers, backpack latches, watch closures. I can readily imagine this trait in him developing one day into the specialized interest characteristic of autism, but right now it seems more like evidence that he is my son, heir to the genetic traits that I'm currently inflicting on my restless, long-suffering spouse.

I am comforted, though, to discover (through the magic of Google Image) that I am not alone in my appreciation for paint chips. People have turned paint chips into graphic art posters, ribbon holders, business-card holders, and wallets. It's like there's a whole blogosphere out there devoted to turning paint chips into fun craft projects. (Do they call the craft-blog world the craftosphere?) For those of us who specialize more in wordcraft than in arts and crafts, paint chips are equally compelling. I, for instance, am slightly embarrassed that the current front-runner for my kitchen is called "Nacho Cheese," but I love the fact that my living-room colour is "Kennebunkport Green" (I'm a sucker for the pseudo-elitist New England glamour of the Benjamin Moore Historical Colours line. And I will insist on spelling "Colours" with a "u" just so I can retain my Canadian citizenship.)

Needless to say, my blogging is suffering from this diversion of my mental energy. So humour me, if you will, and tell me: What do you think of these colours?

Any advice/horror stories/anecdotes to share about the wonderful world of paint-colour selection?

The previous owners of our house painted just about everywhere, so we mostly freshened up trim. We did, however, get to choose a color for the master bedroom, since it was still white. We went with "Victorian Gold" (if I remember correctly). It's a warm, medium brown that is cozy without making the room feel smaller. We worried about the wooden blinds that were already there and the 10 or so different wood finishes on the furniture we've put in there, but it actually works quite nicely.

I will say, however, that if you want to be sure of what a color looks like, at least paint a one-foot patch somewhere (even if it can't be in the room itself, even if it's just on a scrap piece of wood). The other room we painted (the room which had been bright pink and purple) turned out much differently than we expected. We thought it would be grey-blue, but it's more of a silvery lavender instead. Not bad and it will work for the next baby, but not what we wanted.

To me getting the name of a color right is almost as important as the actual color, therefore I don't think "nacho cheese" could ever be a contender at my house. You do know yellow walls are associated with suicide, right? Actually, my bedroom growing up was pastel yellow and my kitchenette is currently a warm yellow color that I adore.

Maybe I can hire you to obsess about the colors in our house? LOL. We are plagued with white walls and that needs to be rectified, probably after the wood flooring is done, but before the kitchen is worked on. We're going to be working on this house for years, I think.

Second mouse's suggestion to get a small can and paint a patch somewhere with average lighting first.

Things look much, much brighter and darker on the wall than they do no the chips--so my advice is, pick the colour you like and then actually paint at least two shades paler. I had a nice orangey-yellow I wanted for the living room and painted a small patch using a small can and it was like Disney orange on the walls--two shades paler and it's still plenty bright and colourful but not migraine-inducing.

We had an insurance claim in our house a few years back after the furnace spewed soot on every surface. We had to choose paint colours for 13 rooms in 24 hours. It was hellish. In the end, we're happy with all but one of our choices.

Do not go with Kennebunkport anything. It's a Bush home and therefore a Bush colour. Are there no suitable Kennedy greens or any other less Bush-like New England colours out there?

Lovely! I was considering whitall brown at one point... for a room still unpainted. I think I may have decided to go a bit lighter.

We have a yellow I love in our living room, a pretty neutral, ochre-y yellow from Benjamin Moore's historical colours series. I think it was called something gold. Boy, that's helpful, eh? I can find out for sure if you're interested. Two years later it still makes me happy every day.

Paint chips are fun to look at. Not so fun (for the indecisive, ahem, ME,) to choose. We have Lenox Tan somewhere in our house and I love it. I want you to put something nice and brown in a room, though, because I dream of a truly brown room but haven't had the courage to go through with it. So if you could help a sister out ....

Um, you've seen my living room, right? The ode to brown? I LOVE BROWN. Still, I"m all nervous because now I hear that Grey is the new Taupe: but I can't paint my whole house grey, can I? And if I do, do I have to replace all the brushed nickel lamps/picture frames that look so nice with the brown?

Which is a long-winded, completely self-centred way of saying: hell yeah, I'm all about paint chips too. And I like your colours, obviously.

This is why I could never buy a new home. I've been agonizing for five years on what to paint the bedroom; having to choose a whole house full of paint, and actually have it coordinate? Gasp. And then countertops? And flooring? And trim? I'd be catatonic with the choices.

Why *don't* men obsess over these things anyway? I mean, they have to live in the same house, too.

Mouse - Different shades of wood! Oh my, yes - that is the next obsession. And we just repainted our bathroom in a colour that I thought was a nice taupe and turned out to be almost mauve. This is why I can't ever actually make a decision.

Andrea - And this is why the colour selector on the Benjamin Moore website is so evil - because the colours that you sub into the photo always look much lighter than on the chip (on my computer, anyway, depending on the angle I have the screen at).

Mad - They do have a Clinton brown, which is two shades darker than the Whitall brown (which is already at the limit of my courage for dark colours). I guess it's too soon for for an Obama red? (Also, Mad, I love the colours in your house. Maybe you can just pick my colours for me?)

I am EXACTLY the same way about choosing paint colors (or colours). I obsess about it for weeks or months. I paint poster boards with candidates and prop them up throughout the rooms to see how the color changes through the day. And I am a total snob about color names. I would never be able to choose a paint called nacho cheese. I'm going to have to advise you against that one.

The best thing about paint is that it is paint! Don't like it? Change it! I am all for testing first. Make sure you put a decent sized swatch on the wall and look at it at different times of day when the lighting is different.

It's not your hair color that once you 'try' it ...you can't change it.

And, darker do not make a room smaller, contrary to popular belief. My dining room is tiny, and painted it (myself as the spots on the ceiling will attest) sort of a pumkin color - which in the can and on the chip were not so great. On the walls, though, it is warm and inviting. And re: aforementioned spots on the ceiling - they add character and give me a sense of pride. I am easily passified.

I had a very hard time, when I was selecting a light brownish yellow, going with the color called "Clam Chowder." It was the color I wanted, but that name is HORRIBLE. I almost went with a different color just to avoid the name.

*Any* time you want to talk paint chips, I'm your gal. I'm a complete whore for the Benjamin Moore historical palate. I have many of the colours in my house: Nantucket Grey, Monterey White, Monroe Bisque, Van Buren Brown, Putnam Ivory. Just to mix things up, I also have some colours from their other lines: Vellum, Capilano Bridge and Moccasin.

Apparently paint chips of the past are taking up far too much space in my brain. This explains a lot.

When we finally have a house that belongs to us and not the military, my husband will likely shut himself in a closet when I start talking about paint chips. I love color! Lots of color! Everywhere! And the Sergeant would be perfectly happy in a house of white walls. Yuck!

Swistle - My mom wants me to pick that one too (the Nacho Cheese is the darkest yellow). I am a bit scared of the Nacho Cheese, but then I also remind myself that it is virtually a trim colour since most of the kitchen is either cupboards, windows, or doors - there's only one wall that will really show, and even that has a door in it.

Ah! Benjamin Moore! My husband works in preservation, and he regularly brings home the big ring o' paint chips. We recently chose Adams Gold for the living room and tossed around Putnam Ivory for the foyer. So priceless, those names are. And who is in charge of creating them?

Nacho Cheese sounds glorious, both the food and color. I love picking out paint colors! (And I'm laughing at Mad's comment about a Bush color.)

Once upon a time, I had the idea that I wanted to paint the bathroom a nice dark red. I picked a nice paint chip, we got the paint, including tinted primer, my husband put up the primer and groaned, and then the paint and groaned some more. It was bubble-gum pink.

Don't trust the paint chips. Do a swatch before making the commitment!!

You're definitely not alone in your obsession. :) I like the browns. We painted the majority of the main floor in our last house a really nice brown (similar to the lightest brown on your paint chip) and I looooved it. I kept the paint chip so I can paint my next place the same colour.

We just redecorated my oldest son's room. For the wall color, I chose a shade that coordinated with a stripe in his new bedding. Husband went to pick it up, and when he brought it home and opened the can, I was horrified to see that it was the exact color of baby poop. He told me it would look good on the walls, and so we put it on. It really does look nice, but I had a moment of profound horror. (pic on my blog today)

That said, I learned through the course of Diminutive One's diagnosis and treatment, that those kinds of obsessions are common among children with a specific set of disorders; in particular Asperger's. Diminutive One is borderline for Asperger's. His obsessions have waned a bit from when he was younger, but it still manifests now and again. I too have the tendency.

I believe that we painted our kitchen the second lightest shade of that yellow, which we regretted a bit. Our office is something much like the green, and it's a lovely colour. The browns leave me cold but that's a personal flaw - they'd probably look quite nice up.

Well, we should hang out so we can obsess together. I'm very fond of the historical colours too. Mr Earth is always commenting sarcastically on whatever my NEWEST obsession happens to be that day (Ebay right now, btw).

I have a soft spot for green, and love the sage-y colour you have showing. I'm also quite drawn to the Pale Almond. The browns are a bit too dark for my taste, I'm more of an Audubon Russet girl - it reads simultaneously brown AND rust.

Choosing paint colors is arduous and all-consuming. Stupid, but true. I'm looking at very similar shades to yours right now, so I love them, all except the dark browns, which may sap the life out of you mid-winter, depending on how much of them you use, of course.

Blogger Rachel Anne at Home Sanctuary is an amazing professional painter. She recommends buying small cans of the coloUrs to paint on big pieces of poster board, which you can tape to your walls and really get a good look at.

It's so funny how much the names paint coloUrs are given can affect us so much. Coming up with all of those names is someone's job, you know, and, apparently, it's a very important one! I'm a sucker for charming names, too. Though it would be possible to still love a Nacho Cheese room, I just know that it would be just that much more wonderful if it evoked images of New England clapboard homes, windswept wildflowers, or even the stand-by sunrise/set.

Anonymous, Luisa - Evil temptresses! I was just telling myself today: NO MORE new lines of paint (I've already done CIL, Debbie Travis, and Benjamin Moore).

Aunt Lolo - BTDT! But at that point I was thinking pumpkin for the living room. She picked me out a beautiful shade, but then I switched over to the green/brown colour scheme. Maybe I should go back and reconsider the marigold colour?

If I were you, I would purchase (or check out) a book on feng shui. Just to add to the madness. I'm only saying that because that's what I do.

I had a mustardy yellow kitchen in our old home and loved it. Maybe it was more pummpkiny, now that I think of it. We accented with a cranberryish red. The cabinets white, appliances were black. It was lovely.

Our home now has a color on most living room walls call "cozy cottage" which was to be a warm, offish white. Hubs thinks it's too yellow. We're contemplating paint chips also. And for the outside of the home to, which is even more daunting.

Good luck!P.S. I am really looking forward to reading this home-building journey with you. Oh and - for my own information - is 'perseveration' an un-p.c. term now? I'm asking for my own self-preservation, knowing that you're the expert (parents always know the most).

I like them! But...be careful with that Natural Wicker. Perhaps it's just my monitor, but it seems slightly pink-y. And any beige that falls into the pink-y category will make your room look...pink-y, for lack of a better word.

Minnesotamom - Pinky colours are my curse - the taupe we used in the bathroom that turned out mauvey is a case in point. I am very drawn to the pinkish hues when I'm looking at neutrals. But the main place that wicker will be used is in Pie's room, where I am rather going for the pinky white.

My husband likes to channel surf after our girls go to bed. If ever he comes upon a home improvement show, TLC, HGTV or the like he flips ahead before the picture has a chance to appear. My appetite for ideas knows no bounds.

Nothing but envy here. I too, love to decorate in my mind for months and have a stash of paint chips. Unfortunately, my dh hates colour and likes all of the walls white. I can't even sell him on a white tint. I performed a little "while you were out" on him in the fall and when he saw it I thought he was going to leave me. I have to settle for painting the kids rooms and live with the white.

Actually, MadDad has a better eye for colour than I do and he loves yellow, just like you. Our dining room is yellow as is our front entrance-way. When I first saw the latter, I literally cried b/c I felt as if we were living in a post-it note. The colour has grown on me, though, and now it's one of my favourites in the house. Just don't tell MadDad I said that.

you are Dave. i am your husband. though i WISH his obsessions ran to paint.

one horror story for us...when we moved in, we were painting most of the rooms in this house and wanted bright, cheery colours because it's an older place and doesn't have big picture windows to let in a lot of light. for the kitchen we found a beautiful yellow, not too far off your nacho cheese, for what was to be the baby's room a vivid grass green. but for our room, we tried blue. it was supposed to be bright, but it turned out garish, almost shocking, like someone had stolen Thomas the Tank Engine's paint and turned it neon. we had to take the can back and have ten shots of black put in, and it's still damn bright though i actually quite like it now. but lesson learned...tiny paint swatches do not give an honest feel of how a room will look. it the colour is bright, tone it down. you'll thank yourself.

I love those paint colors! I think one wall painted a different color would be fantastic! The thing about paint is, you can always paint again. Not that painting again is what you want to do, but it's less of a biggie than, say, changing your mind about where a wall should be.

I know what you mean about the love/hate thing with the names of paint chips. It's a dangerous business, giving name to color. Or, colour. :)

Hey bea--long time no comment, but I'm still here reading. Loved last week's lit. posts!

Just chiming in to say, I hear ya on the paint chips. I'm right in the midst of that very same obsession right now and I am so indecisive. And single-minded. A nasty combination.

I think your colours are lovely. Except. When my husband and I painted our apartment a few years ago, we bought a small can of Nacho Cheese to do a test on one of our walls and, yikes, it was way darker than the paint chip. I love brilliantly coloured walls with white trim (oxblood red, royal blue, etc.), but Nacho cheese was a bit much. I found Behr and Ralph Lauren had nicer yellows in the end.

I think generally, I would suggest using the lighter colour for the three walls and the darker for one instead of the reverse.

And also - yellows, oranges, and some reds appear brighter when there is more of them. So if you're fine with traffic cone orange, or highlighter yellow, great. I painted my old living room a shade of bright yellow that made both my mother and the paint store guy question me twice, but in that room, it was good becuase the room was so dark, it needed the brightening which, in a sunnier room, would have been blinding. I guess what I'm saying here is two things: 1) go cautiously into the brights, btu if you're sure, stick by your guns. 2) You have to see what the colour looks like IN THAT ROOM, with the light in there, so if you don't have the house yet, then choose a few chips in the same range of tones and narrow down once you've gotten into the actual room where the colour is supposed to go so you can see which one looks best in there.

i'm not into any shade of off-white or beige, and apparently, focal walls are o-u-t.

other than that, i see you are an earthy colour lover, which is very grown up. i like the sage-y, muddy shades myself.

of course, my living/dining room is a nice retro turquoise, and the first place me and chris resided was used as a stand-in for a 1970s den of iniquity on a tv show, so maybe my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt.

My husband is the same when I get wrapped up on this. I have unfortunately, had him repaint several rooms just to get the color right. Now, I hire someone to pick for me ... after studying endless magazine pages.

Careful with that brown. Put up a test patch on all the walls you are considering once the house is built and then look at it in all the different times of day. Especially with darker colors that will take many coats to paint and many more to undo.

Paint looks completely different in the morning and evening and afternoon light. Make sure you like it in all of it's different appearances before you do the whole wall.

Oh I do love the names they come up with for paint colours.I have a v funny story about the time we painted our living room many yrs ago, but it's too long for comments. However, we did end up choosing a colour which in no way matched the name chosen for it (which I've forgotten now). And I think there was a colour called "Moonlit Eggplant," although I might be making that up. This should be good for several blog posts. Lucky you. Maybe we should paint as a way to stave off writer's block. Although we are moving, fairly soon. That should work.

Always helpful to paint a piece of white paper (computer/typing paper will do) with the paint color first if in doubt. It is very helpful as a tester. The paint on walls can look very different than the fan deck or paint chip.

I like the golden yellow for the kitchen, but definitely fudge on the name. When people remark, "Ooooh. I love your kitchen. What color is it?" insist that it is "Tears of the Sun" or "Goldenrod Mist" or "Hope of Africa" or some such nonsense. They will be rendered speechless at your sophisticated color palette.

How fun! A whole brand new house to decorate and paint. I am jealous! I love that kind of thing. I would be just as caught up in it as you are!I love earth tones. My dining room is a creamed coffee brown. My kitchen is burnt orange (terra cotta). My bedroom is a ferny green, very calming. We have color everywhere.Have fun choosing!

I don't have much of an eye for decorating, color isn't something I think about very much.It's my boyfriend actually who is agonizing over paint chips at the moment for our newly-purchased Victorian. My eyes start glazing over when he wants to talk about color schemes and matching curtains while showing me swatches that look almost identical. From what I understand though, he wants to go with a red, green, gold color scheme. He also wants to talk about new cabinets and a new layout for the pantry and a deck .

Nacho Cheese! That's hilarious...but fitting for a kitchen.I've only heard a couple good pieces of advice lately regarding paint. 1) If you took the roof off your house, you don't want it to look like a patchwork quilt. This would've been handy to know BEFORE we started painting. Alas.2) Painting three walls one colour and one another colour can really shrink the room so choose which rooms to use that technique in wisely. We did that in our bedroom and we think it looks just fine. Our playroom was painted two colours (2 walls each of each colour) and it looked tiny and awful. Now it's all one colour and perfect!Happy paint-colour-picking. So fun!

Sorry I'm so late to the paint party... beware the nacho cheese. My kitchen was nacho cheese (I think it was actually called Beach Yellow) for far too long. I literally wanted to scream every time I walked in there. At first, I thought it was awesome, so bright, so unbelievable that I actually went through with it. It lasted about two months... so, beware! Paint a patch of it somewhere and see if you can stand it for more than a week... glad you have some fun things to obsess about :)

I'm no help whatsoever. All but one of the walls in my house are white. Though I did have the downstairs painted in Benjamin Moore's too-pale-to-be-called-buttery Linen White and the upstairs painted in Benjamin Moore's vaguely-pinky-undertoned Atrium White.

Great choice. You might want to keep in mind that paint is not permanent. Whatever you choose now will seem horrible and ugly in a few years. By then you will have to paint it over anyway. (There is a reason for all the walls in our home being white every single one without fail, but then - unlike you - I wear my color.)

I'm really sympathetic with the serial obsession thing, really. Lately my husband has had the need to talk about this apparently very annoying trait of mine. He doesn't understand why I am moving from obsession to obsession on a yearly basis while his is always the same.

And I find it really amusing to note that one of my former homes had colours chosen off of both that yellow paint chip and the green paint chip. Yes, they were Benjamin Moore. So that should give you some idea of my opinion on them :)

OK, if the sub-text of this post is that you have lost your one-time obsession with blogging, then I will cry. Bring on the paint chip posts, I say. Show me the house plans. Dream the new house, new town dreams with me. Heck, you can even leave me hanging for a week or so here and there. Just promise me that you won't leave me hanging...or haranguing.

I remember selecting what I thought was a lovely shade of green for our bathroom. It was called something lettuce. I want to say Wilted Lettuce but that doesn't sound right. Anyway, after my husband finished painting we realized the color wasn't right. The entire bathroom seemed to give off a garish green glow. We repainted a buttery yellow.

Nacho cheese is good but Westminster Gold is better. I've got paint chips by the million floating around in drawers and under tea cup saucers just waiting for the day when I draft My Better Half into de-wallpapering yet another room and letting me have at it with a paint brush.So far, in our house, we've got Palace White, Pale Oak, Creme Carmel and White Russian working for us. IN My Better Half's office we jazzed it up a bit with Pecos Spice, a rosy brown that tends towards pinky but is decidedly un-poop colored. It's been up two years and I still like it.

seriously, you can do crafts with paint chips?? crap, i just threw away about 1,000 of them because my buddy benjamin moore mailed me a full set of the 8x8's. (don't you wish you lived next door to me?) :)kennebunkport green is a GREAT interior color - i've used it for a client before. also good: sesame (also benj. moore). it's hard to tell online, but looks like maybe your white needs to be a little creamier (rather than pinkish) to go with those colors. if you email me the color names (sbyeley@gmail.com) i can set them out and look for real and let you know. :) (can you tell i really dig this stuff? my obsession never went away.)

I am in the middle of painting several rooms in my house NOW. I've been doing Sherwin William's colors: close and convenient store to my house. I'm painting my son's room "Lakefront" blue -- actually a swatch from Home Depot but having SW match. And did you know you can have the paint color's shade reduced? e.g. I chose "Spiced Cider" for the eating area, but too dark so had it mixed at 50%, now it's perfect color AND shade. Like you needed more choices. P.S. Love the browns and greens and soft yellows. Not keen on the taupes or the bright yellow. But it's hard to tell from photos.

Cripes, I'm comment # 70 -- paint chips are big.Ultimate paint chip story. We built a house with a huge great room open to a dining room and two halls. One colour was needed for this assembly; in huge quantities. I obsessed for months, finally choosing Just The Right Thing. When we went to buy it (two 10 gallon pails) the guy in the paint store offered us this quantity in the top paint line in a somewhat similar custom colour that had just been returned by someone else, at huge savings. My husband the penny saving freak insisted we buy it over my screams and protests.It has turned out to be the perfect colour. Ten years later, I still love it.As to what it is -- a soft dove grey that picks up and reflects the blues of winter snow, the greens of spring and summer. It plays up the ochre brick chimney wall and the cedar in the ceiling. I would never, never have chosen it. And I will probably not be able to reproduce it when the time comes (soon) to repaint. Sigh.

I tape the chips on the wall next to important things like the oak mantel and tiles on the fireplace, the carpet and such. There will be a swarm of samples at first and then I eliminate them until I am loving just one. Oh, yes, and I sneak up on them! Good luck.